VA-API Support For Google Android Platform

We have been tipped off that a few VA-API patches have hit the upstream libva tree for furthering along Google's Android support for this video acceleration API. VA-API is arguably the second best video playback acceleration API available to Linux users, after the NVIDIA-created VDPAU.

In particular, this patch and that patch make a few refinements to VA-API while at the same time making updates to the Google Android support. The work was done by Austin Yuan and signed off by Intel engineers; Intel is the principal backer of VA-API. It was also at this point that libva 1.0.6 was tagged in Git.

Of course, simply supporting the Video Acceleration API on Android isn't much good unless it's supported within the multimedia players, but this is becoming less of an issue with nearly every player either now supporting VDPAU and/or VA-API. The leading exception right now though is Adobe's Linux Flash Player, but better GPU acceleration support for Flash on Linux is on the way. More of a problem is the embedded graphics drivers that need to support VA-API, so hopefully next up when it comes to Android and video/GPU news, we can report that there are improvements in this area.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.